Auditor's Report Criticizes Florida's Voter
Database
Computerworld (06/26/06) Songini, Marc
Florida Auditor General William Monroe announced in a report published
earlier in June that the state's voter registration information can be at
risk for theft, corruption, access that is not authorized, and change, in
spite of the most stringent effort of elections authorities. The report
discovered multiple IT security problems with Florida's main voter
registration database. For example, says Florida auditor general's office
IT audit manager John Ingram, the system review determined that a state
employee was inappropriately granted access to the database and that a
worker whose contract was concluded mistakenly held on to access. The
auditor's report suggests that Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb's office
establish a set of security protocols to help county authorities make
certain that Florida Voter Registration System information is shielded from
unapproved access. In addition, the report calls on Florida to set up
virus protection, patch management, upkeep, and system recovery standards.
Consultant Paula Hawthorn points out that possible security and
information-integrity troubles with voter registration databases are not
new to Florida. Hawthorne was co-chair of a committee established by ACM's
U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) that studied the condition of voter
registration databases and determined that the voter registration database
plans of numerous states do not have satisfactory security measures. To
view the report--Statewide Databases of Registered Voters--visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm/VRD
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Largest Digital Art Exhibition Debuts in Boston at
SIGGRAPH 2006
VFX World (06/23/06)
The SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery: Intersections will be on display between
July 30 and Aug. 3 at ACM's 33rd International Conference and Exhibition on
Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Boston. It is among the
biggest digital art exhibitions in the world, featuring sculptures and
wall-mounted paintings and collages. The pieces exemplify such new art
forms as motion painting, LED optical art, robotics, and electronic fiber
art. Interactive exhibits will allow visitors to move objects on a light
table to create music, move virtual people with their heart rate, and use
Voice over Internet Protocol technology to create a Web mosaic. The 150
works of art on display are from artists, researchers, and technologists
from more than a dozen countries. Bonnie Mitchell, SIGGRAPH 2006 Art
Gallery chair from Bowling Green State University, says, "These are some of
the most innovative digital artists in the world. The breadth and depth of
the content is staggering and should leave the audience breathless.
Furthermore, it is amazing and inspiring to see people from around the
world creatively pushing the boundary of what can be done when art and
technology collide." To learn more about SIGGRAPH 2006, or to register,
visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/
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Some Rights Reserved: Advancing Flexible Copies
New York Times (06/26/06) P. B1; Rohter, Larry
A worldwide alliance of artists, scientists, and attorneys met in Rio de
Janeiro this past weekend to establish a "creative commons" that permits
artists and others to determine which rights to their work they want to
keep and which they would prefer to share. The Creative Commons system
permits creators and patrons of culture to see or listen to a digital work
and to copy, remix, or try it out, so long as the author is correctly
credited. Since the launch of the Creative Commons idea three years ago,
around 145 million "creations" have been registered, and over 100 million
of those licenses have been given out in the past six months. Blogs
comprised the biggest number, followed by images, and then music, although
the video industry is expanding. Microsoft last week made available a
plug-in for Windows Office software that allows users to label their own
creations, such as Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, with a
Creative Commons license. Activists from several nations, however,
including Australia and France, contend that musical collection societies
are attempting to stop artists from making their work accessible under any
system other than typical copyright. These groups, which obtain
performance royalties on music from radio stations, recording firms, and
others, have threatened to fine or bring action against musicians who
license their work via Creative Commons.
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Putting Services at the Heart of Tomorrow's
Software
IST Results (06/26/06)
Microsoft and Computer Associates are involved in a four-year project with
other corporate, academic, and research partners in Europe to develop
methods, tools, and techniques for system integrators and service providers
to accommodate the linking together of small, functional services that
perform a larger task. Participants in the approximately 15.2 million-euro
SeSCE project say it is the last key step in the move toward Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA), and could allow computing to fulfill the
promise of offering improvements in productivity and functional
flexibility. The group addressed the issue of standards, but the focus of
its work is on service engineering, service discovery, service-centric
system engineering, and service delivery. The tools, protocols, and
methods embraced by SeSCE to develop a service development platform include
a search engine and semantics for service description and testing. Halfway
through the project, SeSCE has a demonstrator of its service composition
platform, and partner Telecom Italia plans to show how SMS and GPS services
can be used to update a commuter's schedule to take account of a traffic
jam. "If the driver is going to be late for a meeting because of traffic,
for example, the service can alert his or her assistant who changes the
schedule and rearranges any meetings," says Matteo Melideo, coordinator of
the SeSCE project. "Then an SMS message is sent to the driver's mobile
phone providing a confirmation of the new schedule." IST has another
project that has business workflow and service composition techniques that
are in line with the SOA model, but the Adaptive Services Grid needs more
advanced semantic tools.
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Magnetic Field Research Could Make Computers 500 Times
More Powerful
University of Bath (06/22/06)
The University of Bath is among the universities and research centers
participating in a three-year study that aims to use inverse electron spin
resonance to carry electric signals without wiring. The resulting magnetic
fields could make computers 200 to 500 times faster without altering their
size. If the study is a success, Dr. Alain Nogaret of the University of
Bath's Department of Physics believes computers with wireless
semiconductors could become reality in five to 10 years. Additionally, the
technology could quicken the process of collecting data from health
monitoring sensors and result in the development of a system of integrated
circuits that can be rerouted and maintain operations in the event of a
connection failure. Nogaret says, "We can only go so far in getting more
power from silicon chips by shrinking their components--conventional
technology is already reaching the physical limits of materials it uses,
such as copper wiring, and its evolution will come to a halt."
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No Pictures Please: Researchers Develop System to Thwart
Unwanted Video and Still Photography
Georgia Institute of Technology (06/17/06)
A team of Georgia Tech researchers has developed a technology that can
block the operation of video and still digital cameras using off-the-shelf
sensors, lighting equipment, a projector, and a computer. The system
detects digital cameras by scanning for the reflectivity and shape of their
image-producing sensors. Principal commercial applications include the
prevention of illegal video copying in theaters or other venues and
protecting against surreptitious photography in small, restricted areas,
such as government buildings or industrial environments. The image sensors
in cameras are retroreflective, meaning that they direct light back to its
origin instead of scattering it, which could make them easy to detect in a
darkened theater. The researchers' prototype locates a camera's image
sensors, known as CCDs, using visible light and two cameras, though a
commercial application could employ invisible infrared lasers and
photo-detecting transistors, transmitting information about a suspicious
reflection's properties to a computer to determine if it is, in fact, a
camera. "The biggest problem is making sure we don't get false positives
from, say, a large shiny earring," said Jay Summet, a Georgia Tech research
assistant. "We need to make our system work well enough so that it can
find a dot, then test to see if it's reflective, then see if it's
retroreflective, and then test to see if it's the right shape." Upon
detecting a video camera, the system would overwhelm its CCD with a thin
beam of white light that would render any video recorded unusable.
Neutralizing still images in settings with higher levels of ambient light
also shows commercial promise, because the image sensors in most digital
cameras and cell phones are placed closer to the lens than in video
cameras, making them easier to detect. Most of the remaining obstacles to
commercialization involve developing better algorithms to eliminate false
positives.
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'Silicon Velcro' Could Make Sticky Chips
New Scientist (06/19/06) Simonite, Tom
A team of German researchers has developed a bizarre form of silicon that
can peel apart and stick together which could be used in microprocessors
and devices that guide the flow of liquid on a microscopic scale. Called
"silicon Velcro," the material was created from black silicon, a substance
produced by bombarding normal silicon with high-energy ions or a laser beam
and forming a microscopic array of thickly clustered needle-like objects at
its surface that does not let light escape. Silicon Velcro could help chip
manufacturers manipulate extremely thin layers of silicon without having to
use potentially harmful adhesives or heat. "The Velcro could be used as a
carrier system," said researcher Mike Stubenrauch. "A carrier wafer could
be used to pick up the thin wafer and hold it for processing." The
material could also be used to form devices that regulate the flow of
liquid at microscopic scales by sticking together a smooth layer and one
covered with tiny grooves. Afterwards, the layers can be unstuck to
determine what happened inside or retrieve a valuable substance,
Stubenrauch said, cautioning that because the needles can break over time,
silicon Velcro can only be used a finite number of times. Previous
research concerning black silicon had concentrated on its light-absorbing
properties, though the application of the material to manufacturing
sophisticated microchips is promising, said Darren Bagnall, a
microelectronics researcher at Southampton University. "If you want to
quickly bolt together chips made using different processing technologies,
this Velcro would be good."
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Will the Internet Die in September?
Register (UK) (06/22/06) McCarthy, Kieren
ICANN's upcoming meeting in Marrakech will be its last under its current
Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. government as well as its IANA
contract to run the database that specifies where everything is on the
Internet, both expiring on Sept. 30. ICANN's relationship with the U.S.
government has been criticized by many. The upcoming meeting is scheduled
to address several hot topics, including the institution of IDNs, the
internationalization of ICANN, and Whois privacy issues. Other contentious
issues have not been officially included though they are bound to be on the
minds of participants, including U.S. involvement in the rejection of the
.xxx domain and ICANN's agreement with VeriSign to avoid litigation, which
has yet not been finalized due, some say, to efforts by U.S. Net companies
that are unhappy about the deal. Little has been said about what will
happen after Sept. 30. ICANN was originally supposed to become independent
when the original contract with the U.S. government terminated in 2003.
The government, trying to avoid further criticism, has shied away from
stating what many believe to be its true intention, to hold onto ICANN for
even longer.
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Thousands of H-1B Workers Are Underpaid, GAO Says
InformationWeek (06/22/06) Chabrow, Eric
Thousands of overseas nationals hired under the H-1B program have been
paid less than standard wages, the Government Accountability Office
announced on Thursday, although the percentage of those being underpaid is
small. The GAO determined that the Department of Labor approved 3,229 H-1B
applications between January 2002 and September 2005 in which the wage the
employer vowed to pay on the application was less than the prevailing wage
for that job. For example, in fiscal 2005 Labor approved an application
where an employer promised to pay $55,000 annually for a job in which the
prevailing wage was $75,000, a difference of 37 percent. The number of
petitions not paying the going wage, though, is tiny. Between 2000 and
last year, the government sanctioned almost 1.57 million petitions, the
overwhelming majority being renewals of H-1B visa holders already working
in this country. Information technology positions accounted for two of the
leading five jobs for H-1B visa petitions: 674,9085 for systems analysts
and 58,429 for other computer-associated jobs. Other leading five
positions seeking H-1B visas include college professor and researchers,
accountants and auditors, and electrical and electronics engineers. The
GAO also found 933 certified applications with employer identification
number prefixes that were not valid, which it claims could suggest a fake
application.
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Nanowire Transistors Faster Than Silicon
Technology Review (06/19/06) Bullis, Kevin
Harvard researchers have demonstrated that nanowire transistors can yield
speeds up to four times faster than traditional silicon devices,
potentially leading to inexpensive, high-performance chips for cell phones
and displays. By enabling the assembly of memory, logic, and sensing
layers on the same chip, the research could also drive speed and conserve
space, according to Harvard chemistry professor and lead researcher Charles
Lieber. Nanowires are appealing because they require relatively simple
lithography, though until now transistors built on the technology had been
unable to match the performance of carbon nanotubes and other nano devices.
Because they are made with a normal crystal structure with standard
electronic properties, nanowires, only about 10 nm wide, have a high level
of predictability. Nanowires are likely to find their first uses in
ultra-sensitive sensors to detect single molecules. Lieber says nanowires
may never yield performance increases sufficient to justify the cost of
using them instead of conventional devices in laptops and desktops, though
it may well be worth scaling the technology to use in flexible screens,
embedding information-processing in the display itself. The technology
could also improve compact devices by stacking memory, logic, and sensing
circuitry on top of each other. "If you can put ultra-high-performance
materials into 3-D structures, through layer-by-layer assembly, it allows
you to put a lot more stuff into an area," Lieber says. The main
improvement involves the nanowires' "core-shell" structure, which confines
electrons to a limited space, enabling them to quickly move through the
wires, a critical feature for their increased speed.
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An Intelligent Valuation System
Basque Research (06/20/06)
Researchers at the Public University of Navarre are using artificial
intelligence to create a computerized system that would determine the value
of real estate like an experienced and knowledgeable property expert.
Existing informatics applications focus on statistical values, while a
property appraiser brings a subjective element to his or her valuations.
The research team is using artificial intelligence to teach the valuation
system how to interpret expressions such as "the house is a disaster,"
which could mean something different to a number of property appraisers, by
"extrapolating the average of what each of the valuers means." The
intelligent learning process is modeled after the function of neurons in
the human brain. The Navarre researchers are collaborating with the
Trabajos Catastrales company on the property valuation system, which has
been tested on Pamplona to determine prices for its housing market. The
next step is to give the property valuation system the ability to
intelligently zone by house prices in a city, province, or region. The
researchers expect to complete the project by next December.
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Semantics Poses Challenge for Web Services
IST Results (06/21/06)
Though service oriented architecture holds the vast potential of creating
diversified, agile programs that can synergistically combine to solve
complex problems, getting those programs to communicate with each other is
a major challenge. To address that problem, the IST-funded Adaptive
Systems Grid (ASG) program has developed a semantic-service reference
platform to demonstrate the ability of the software applications to
autonomously combine to solve a larger problem, requiring each program to
both announce its own function and recognize the function of others. In
the tests, the software executed and combined without human manipulation.
Machine-readable semantic descriptions are key to locating and retrieving
software and objects on the Web. When developing ontologies, the greatest
challenge is to determine the appropriate level of granularity, as
coarse-grained ontologies can be created easily, but typically have vague
descriptions that make them difficult to locate by search. Fine-grained
ontologies are labor-intensive to create, but are easier to discover
because of their accurate descriptions. Detailed ontologies and semantics
can get extremely complex, as the number terms required to describe
specific functions escalates rapidly, and adapting them to other
developments becomes expensive. "This is an area that needs more
research," said Dominick Kuropka, scientific coordinator of the ASG
project. "What is the proper level of expressiveness for modeling of
semantic services, which provides a good balance between the investment in
ontology and service modeling and obtainable level of utility and
automation?" In his search for the balance between cost and detail,
Kuropka found, unsurprisingly, that greater detail delivers greater
performance, though the greatest performance improvements come in the
middle range of detail. The INFRAWEBS project took an alternative approach
to service applications, integrating similarity- and logic-based reasoning
to retrieve, then clarify, service ontologies.
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Research: Spatial Abilities Key to Engineering
EE Times (06/19/06)No. 1428, P. 12; Schiff, Debra
University of Minnesota postdoctoral research fellow Wendy Johnson and
Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research director Thomas Bouchard
have conducted a new study that supports the theory that spatial abilities
are an important factor for success in the field of engineering. Men have
an overwhelming presence in engineering positions, and research from
Johnson and Bouchard shows that men are likely to have a higher degree of
intelligence in the rotation and focus dimensions. The rotation dimension
represents the higher spatial abilities, and the focus dimension signifies
the ability to solve problems by focusing on details in a linear fashion.
They have found that women tend to have better verbal, memory, and
diffusion intelligence, or the ability to solve problems from a number of
perspectives at once and synergistically. Georgia Institute of Technology
professor of psychology Philip Ackerman says general tests such as the SAT
will not show this difference between males and females, but AP tests may
reveal the impact of spatial abilities in terms of the major students
ultimately choose to pursue. The foreign language exam is the only AP exam
on which girls perform considerably better than boys. Their research can
be found in the journal Intelligence.
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Diamonds in the Data
Federal Computer Week (06/19/06) Vol. 20, No. 20, P. 26; Sternstein, Aliya
Federal agencies' search for meaningful information within massive
databases via data mining often requires a balance between behavioral
observation and privacy infringement. As more and more agencies mine
personal data, legislators and watchdog organizations are asking for
greater compliance with privacy guidelines to ensure that such data is
properly shielded. "Increased use by federal agencies of data mining...has
been accompanied by uncertainty regarding privacy requirements and
oversight of such systems," noted Linda Koontz with the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) in testimony before the House Judiciary
Committee's Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee in May. Though
data mining has no single meaning and some people protest the assumption
that such analysis is inherently bad, Koontz says agencies should adhere to
the standards of the E-Government Act, which requires the evaluation of
proposed data-mining projects' privacy implications. Data mining
techniques are being applied to efforts as diverse as anticipating and
formulating response strategies for disease outbreaks and terrorist
attacks, improving customer service, and spotting and deterring criminal
activity. To address the growth of federal data-mining initiatives and the
accompanying lack of oversight, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) has proposed
the Privacy Officer With Enhanced Rights Act of 2006, which seeks to
bolster the role of the Homeland Security Department's chief privacy
officer; he has also requested the Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee to conduct hearings on the Privacy Act, which is more
than three decades old. "The fact that the Privacy Act has numerous
exemptions for intelligence and law enforcement purposes...raises key
questions as to what privacy rules govern in those circumstances," Akaka
says. Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Lee Tien believes
agencies need more personnel to enforce data-mining regulation, and to that
end has recommended congressionally-approved legislation and funding.
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Tera-Scale Computing: Intel's Attack of the Cores
eWeek (06/19/06) Vol. 23, No. 25, P. 13; Spooner, John G.
As it prepares to roll out a spate of multicore processors, Intel is
launching its Core Microarchitecture, a novel form of circuitry focused on
optimizing power efficiency. Intel researchers have hinted that they
envision chips with more than 10 cores by the decade's end. As it moves
toward terascale computing, which could ultimately lead to chips with
hundreds of cores, Intel's chips will look and function differently than
its current technology. Multicore processors work in accordance with the
semiconductor design law stating that smaller, slower cores make more
efficient use of energy. The individual cores would be the same basic x86
cores that Intel uses today, though they would divide up the workload for a
given task and process in parallel. "There's this advantage to simplifying
the individual [processor] core, accepting the reduction in single-thread
performance, while positioning yourself, because of the power reduction, to
put more cores in the die," said Intel CEO Justin Rattner. "That's the
energy-efficiency proposition of terascale." Terascale chips would be
ideally suited for tasks involving massive amounts of data, though other
developments must materialize in order for terascale processing to meet its
potential, such as improved memory caches, faster data interconnects, and
more efficient clock timing mechanisms. Software developers must also
begin to incorporate multicore designs into their applications. Terascale
chips will continue to double transistor counts which, already in the
billions, could reach 32 billion by the end of the decade. Though the
increasing number of transistors have thus far been used to beef up the
onboard memory caches and create more complex chips, the shift to terascale
processing will entail more, simpler cores. Intel is working with major
software developers to ensure that this shift is implemented consistently
throughout the industry.
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Machines Mimic Human Sight
InformationWeek (06/19/06)No. 1094, P. 20; Chabrow, Eric
Computer scientists across the country are trying to take visual
recognition technology to the next level by giving new systems the ability
to sort images in the manner of the human brain. Today's visual
recognition technology is taught by a statistical learning system that can
only recognize one type of image. However, a computerized visual
recognition system using mathematical models based on the way the brain
processes images would be able to determine many images. MIT's Center for
Biological and Computational Learning is involved in this area of research,
and has neurologists studying the way in which the brain responds to images
and computer scientists creating mathematical models of neuron simulation
patterns. Current visual recognition technology is used for tasks such as
recognizing a product on an assembly line, but neuron-based imaging
technology could be used to create advanced surveillance software. In
addition to being able to recognize a face in a crowd in seconds,
neuron-based imaging technology would help neurologists diagnose
radiological images. Scientists still do not know enough about how the
brain responds to images, and will need more sophisticated imaging
technologies to be developed in order to assess the feedback sent by the
brain.
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Modern Relics
Government Computer News (06/19/06) Vol. 25, No. 16,Jackson, William
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently hosted
a workshop addressing the problem of data loss, attempting to craft a
strategy for government, industry, and academia to identify what
information should be preserved, and how they should be preserving it.
Conference participants estimate that every 15 minutes the world produces
enough digital information to fill the Library of Congress, and, though
much of it is important to no one, in some areas the creation of meaningful
data is outpacing the expansion of digital storage capacities. "So much
information is digital, and people are feeling the pain of losing access to
their information," said NIST's Josh Lubell. The conference participants
agreed on the need to develop interoperability standards for data storage
across software and hardware platforms. The National Archives and Records
Administration and the Library of Congress are working to preserve digital
materials in compatible formats. The library is working with other
government agencies and outside contractors to develop a national strategy
for the collection and preservation of the fast-growing body of digital
material. NIST is especially concerned with the preservation of
engineering data, which have become too complex for humans to process
without the aid of machines. CAD applications deal with levels of
mathematics beyond human comprehension, which binds the designs to the
software. When the software becomes obsolete, the designs are at risk of
getting lost unless they were created with an eye for interoperability.
The private sector has not devoted enough attention to the problem because
it is not seen as an immediate business concern, says Lubell. "The
business case has to be made first" if people are expected to use
standards, he says.
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